Musical video, 'The Nano Song,' a megahit on YouTube

BERKELEY — How would you
explain "nanotechnology" to a science novice? A group
of UC Berkeley students and alums answered this call with a pint-sized
video — part "Sound of Music," part Muppets,
part Dan the Science Man — whose online reception has been
anything but small.

"The Nano Song" features music and lyrics by the multi-talented
Ryan Miyakawa, a 27-year-old pianist-composer and engineering
grad student. UC Berkeley junior Glory Liu — a classics
and political economy major with three years of classical
music training — does
the vocals, cheerfully explaining nanotechnology to a band
of puppets: "A million nanometers that are lined up in a
row/Are just about as long as a single flake of snow…." The
piece went online Feb. 22, when the group submitted it
to an American Chemical Society (ACS) contest, for Nano
101 videos no more than three minutes long.

Fame wasted no time. By early March, "The Nano Song" had
spread virally, with mentions by PhysOrg.com, Scientific
American, WIRED,
and boingboing.
When YouTube featured the video on its home page, it quickly
racked up close to 300,000 hits (as of the first week of
March), along with a mountain of comments from viewers,
like "'Nano
Song' is rocking the globe!"

"I turned comments off after the first 200," says
Miyakawa.

"Nano Song" puppet.

Nanotechnology is a hot topic in science and engineering, but
experts in the field have trouble explaining it to the uninitiated,
he notes. On the nano-contest
website — where ACS posts submissions and viewers vote
for their favorites — he found many "boring" explanations
of nano-scale particles at "10 to the minus nine." Instead,
he says, "I wanted to do something fun that would be acceptable
to the public."

To Miyakawa, a silly yet edifying song seemed to be in order.
He spent a day composing a tune in 4/4/ time — using music
software to lay down a big orchestral sound — and writing
lyrics with K-to-adult appeal, with a refrain that goes: "Nano,
nana, nano/ What a wonderful surprise/That ordinary is
extraordinary/When you make it nano size!" Then Liu came
over to practice. (The two met in a popular course, "Physics
and Music," where
he is a longtime grad-student instructor; together they
once produced a song for an "American Idol" songwriting
competition.) Turning the snappy nano song into a video
was challenging — requiring
the talents of Patrick Bennett (cinematography and editing)
and a troupe of students and alums to build and manipulate
puppets for the shoot.

"The Nano Song" is currently the top-rated and most-viewed
contest submission (with more than 12,000 views on the
ACS site). So its creators are "cautiously optimistic" about
their chances for taking the $500 prize — which they hope
to drop at Chez Panisse.

To see "behind the scenes" photos of the video's making,
or download an MP3, visit The
Nano Song website.